Tag: Colette

A  Russian Claudine:  “Ariane, A Russian Girl,” by Claude Anet

The French writer Claude Arnet’s  Ariane, A Russian Girl, might almost be a women’s novel, and might appeal to fans of Colette.  The smart, whimsical Ariane is reminiscent of Colette’s Claudine, the heroine of a quartet of French novels, the relevant two being Claudine at School and Claudine in Paris.

Ariane is more sophisticated than Claudine, a country girl; she lives in a provincial city with her aunt, a free thinker, and spends her leisure hanging out at the Hotel de Londres. Ariane is attractive, brilliant, and charming, pursued by men and boys, whom she withers with a look if bored. Her friends assume that she is sexually experienced, but her main source of information is her guardian, Aunt Varvara, a former doctor who confides in Ariane about her philosophy of serial monogamy:  she has had 18 lovers. The secret of happiness is not to fall in love.

Varvara could be the protagonist of her own Colette novel.  Anet devotes a fascinating chapter to Varvara, a woman who is joyful and beautiful until she falls in love at 40 for the first time. The handsome 50-year-old doctor soon drops her and inappropriately turns his attention to Ariane. (His daughter is in Ariane’s class at school.) Varvara is devastated, and though Ariane seldom shows emotion, her resolve to control her sexual relationships is rooted both in the sexist society and her knowledge of her aunt’s experiences.

Education is another hurdle for women in the early 20th century. Ariane’s father refuses to finance her university education, insisting that it is a woman’s place to get married, etc. Ariane angrily decides to pay her own way to the University of Moscow by any means. She arranges to visit a rich admirer twice a week for an hour of talk in return for tuition money. 

And now we move from “Ariane at School” to “Ariane in Moscow.”

Is the university enough for Ariane? The whole novel has prepared us for love.  One night at the theater she meets Constantin Michel, a charming businessman who arrives late for Boris Godunov. They discuss actors during the intermission: she is critical of a charismatic actor she went out with until she decided he was mediocre.

The two are having such a good time that they are reluctant to part after the play. They laughingly negotiate what to do next, but Ariane has control.

He proposed a supper.  Absolutely no way.   He wanted to take a coach.  She opposed it.  She was determined to return on foot, even though she lived in the Sadovaya, a half hour from the center of town.  So there they were, stumbling through the mud and melted snow.  The holes in the pavement… legitimized the offer – not refused – of an arm. 

They have fun and are intellectually and sexually well-matched, but they struggle for control in the relationship.

And yet there are also contradictions in Ariane’s story. She talks animatedly about past lovers, but the first time they make love she weirdly insists that he allow her to lie there like a corpse.  We are astonished, but then there is blood on the bed, which Constantin believes is his own. And once we decode her character, we are sympathetic to Ariane. We crossed our fingers for a happy ending.

And that is why this is a women’s novel. The suspense of romance!

Is the ‘F’ Word Necessary? A Look at HBO, D. H. Lawrence, Colette, Doris Lessing, and Erica Jong

“Fuck!”  – The Last of Us (HBO)

“I don’t over-eat myself and I don’t over-fuck myself.” – Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence

My husband and I canceled HBO Max, not for the first time. I assure you, we found nothing worth watching this spring, certainly not The Last of Us, a much- lauded rehash of the American obsession with zombie films.  In a post-apocalyptic, post-plague America, human survivors battle zombies, who were infected by a fungi plague and now share a common root system.  But, alas, the humans are less believable than the zombies:  they are so fearfully athletic and skilled with assault weapons that they are a bit zombie-like themselves.

We learned one thing from The Last of Us:  the post-plague human beings say “fuck” constantly.  And we wondered, Do the zombies attack the humans because they hate the f” word?

Mind you, I don’t philosophically object to the word “fuck.”  It seemed to be a radical breakthrough in the late 20th century when radicals and university students began to say “fuck,” “prick,” and “cunt” in an attempt  to defuse the language of sexuality.   But HBO is not about defusion: it is about profanity, shock value, and sales. 

For me, the word “fuck” plays a more vital role in literature than TV.  Naturally, one turns to D. H. Lawrence, whose books were banned for their lyrical descriptions of sex long before his famous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was banned in 1929.  His two best novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, were banned in 1915 and 1920 respectively for “obscenity,”  which often took the form of  conversations about sex.
 

The Rainbow and  Women in Love are a duology.   The former tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, spanning sixtysome years from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. In the sequel, Women in Love, two couples battle to find balance in sexuality, Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, a teacher who philosophizes about what their relationship should be, and artistic Gudrun, Ursula’s younger sister, with the wealthy Gerald Crich, whose father owns the colliery.

Everyone knows Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whether he or she has read it or not.  Though far from his best work, it is crucial to understanding Lawrence’s literary role as a pioneer in changing sexual attitudes. Lady Chatterley was banned in England from 1929 till 1960. 

Lawrence vigorously, perhaps too vigorously, uses the word “fuck” throughout the novel.   At one point, the sexy gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, says, “I don’t over-eat myself and I don’t over-fuck myself.” Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a brave book about sex, albeit with  unintentionally funny bits that make me giggle and question my sanity.   For instance, Lady Chatterley (Connie) and her lover, Oliver Mellors, refer to their genitals as Lady Jane and John Thomas.  May I just say, What the f?   In one particularly ridiculous, unerotic segment, Oliver decorates their bodies with flowers, and “wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his navel.”  He prattles  about “the wedding of John Thomas and Lady Jane.” 

Still, this novel is  powerful in its way, full of anger, sex, and  the breakdown of class. Sex is the framework for the healing of Constance Chatterley and  the  gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Constance is lonely, because her husband. Clifford, once a fine, strong soldier, was  crippled in World War I and is now a paraplegic. Their sex life is over.
 
So it is no wonder that this vibrant young woman falls for the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, a working-class bloke who is virile and independent while the upper class is apparently crumbling. But he is harsh when he speaks of Clifford’s paralysis.  Though Lawrence  used Oliver as a mouthpiece for his own views, and Clifford’s paralysis is, I suppose,  a metaphor for the iniquitous nature and downfall of the upper class,  I find Oliver a completely unsympathetic character – except sexually to Connie. 

In Doris Lessing’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley, she analyzes Lawrence’s repeated use of “fuck” and “cunt.” She says he “wanted to rescue [them] from the lexicon of ‘dirty words.'”  Lessing writes,
 

And now, what would poor Lawrence say if he could see us now, where ‘fuck’ can be used casually and unthinkingly, having almost lost its power to shock?  And ‘cunt’ is not much better?  And the sex may be not much more than a glass of white wine?

Oddly, few women writers of the 20th century used the “f” word in their novels.  I think of Colette, whose writing is lush, lyrical, and sensual, who wrote about love affairs but did not feel the need to describe sex explicitly. .Doris Lessing wrote brilliant sex scenes but certainly did  not use the “f” word.  And yet we are thrilled when Martha Quest in Landlocked, the third book in The  Children of Violence series, finally has a skillful lover and leans about good sex when she is nearly 30. In The Four-Gated City, the last book in the series, Martha has more sex, and the sex scenes, good and bad, are more explicit.

(N. B. Doris Lessing did not use the “f” word in her writing, but when she received the Nobel, journalists caught her getting out of a taxi and the first word she said was, “Fuck!”)

The woman writer best known for using the “f” word in the 20th century is undoubtedly Erica Jong, the author of the best-selling novel, Fear of Flying,  and several other books, including volumes of poetry and three sequels to Fear of Flying.


 Influenced by Henry Miller, the American writer whose novel, Tropic of Cancer, was banned in 1938 for sex scenes, Jong writes in great detail about sexual desire and sexual satisfaction. That said, the  narrator, Isadora Wing, is the doppelgänger of Jong, a poet married to a Japanese psychoanalyst. We empathize with Isadora’s fear on the plane as she and her husband fly to Switzerland for a psychoanalysts’ conference:  there are 117 psychoanalysts on the plane, Isadora tells us wryly. 

Being a psychoanalyst’s wife is not enough for Isadora, who is dissatisfied with her marriage and bored with  her husband’s profession.. She fantasizes about finding the “zipless fuck,” as she calls her fantasy of great sex without commitment.  And we read on, wondering, Will she get it?

I was not a great fan of Fear of Flying, her first novel, but some of her later novels are elegant, especially Fear of Dying, in which she explores a woman’s sexuality in old age.  And that, we will agree, is seldom written about in novels, and  is all but banned from human consciousness.  Kudos to Jong, the female Henry Miller, who fortunately was not banned for her work, though there is a lot of that around these days.

And I really must reread Fear of Flying, which I was probably too young for when I first read it!

A Short Novel for the Weekend: Colette’s “The Vagabond”

Last spring, I did not require a soporific cup of Ovaltine at bedtime, nor did I pop a daring over-the-counter sleeping pill.   After 10 minutes of reading Proust’s self-indulgent musings in Sodom and Gomorrah (Book IV of In Search of Lost Time), I fell into a deeply bored, dreamless sleep. The character Albertine was  back, and I wished the narrator would hurry up and decide whether she was his girlfriend or a lesbian.  But no, he went on and on and on and on.  Finally I dismissed Proust as a  boring old droner who had only one good book in him – Swann’s Way.

And then I turned to Colette, my favorite French writer of the 20th century, who may be underrated these days because her short, lyrical,  decidedly feminine novels often take the form of  irreverent meditations on love.  People tend to think a sprawling  novel in need of a very strict editor is more impressive than a short, concise, perfect novel.
                 

Colette was a celebrity writer, an actress, a music hall artist, bisexual, and married thrice.  My favorite of her books is The Vagabond, a charming, witty novel based on Colette’s experiences as a traveling music hall artist.  The narrator, Renée, is divorced and a former writer, who has found peace in the routine of the theater and enjoys her financial independence. She describes her life backstage and onstage, the eccentricity of her colleagues, and her blissfully solitary home life with her dog, Fossette.
 
Renée captures her experiences succinctly and gracefully.  From her dressing room she writes:  

It’s absolutely freezing in here!  I rub my hands together, grey with cold under the wet white which is beginning to crack.  Good Lord!  the radiator pipes are icy; it is Saturday and on Saturdays here they rely on the high-spirited popular audience, rowdy and slightly drunk, to warm the auditorium.  No one has given a thought to the artistes’ dressing-rooms.
 

This is primarily a theater novel, but it is also the story of a love affair.  Renée has an admirer whom she calls Big Noodle: he keeps sending her notes and flowers, though she does nothing to encourage him.  Divorced and traumatized by her first marriage to a famous philandering painter (Colette’s first husband was a famous philandering employer of ghostwriters),  she does not want a relationship with a man.

You know how it is when you’re in your thirties and single.  You tell your friends you don’t want to meet anyone, and still they arrange blind dates. Friends and fate conspire against Renée.  They worry that she will be lonely as she ages.  And they think Maxime is a good egg.  Renée jokingly thinks Maxime is the courtesan, doing nothing, while she goes out to earn her daily bread.  She finds it ridiculous that he doesn’t work.  And she is determined to go on a 43-day spring tour in France with her co-worker, Brague, and a young man they call “the troglodyte.” 


  I love Renee’s descriptions of life on the road in the many letters she writes to Maxime.  Spring arrives, and she is enchanted by the sudden appearance of flowers (all of which she knows by name) and takes long walks in parks.  And she is not at all sure she wants to exchange her solitude for wifehood. 


We love Colette’s novels because her characters are shrewd and vulnerable at the same time, as women usually are.  But in one of Colette’s later books about a middle-aged women (Break of Day may be the one I’m thinking of), she admits that she and her fictional counterparts diverge in their choices. Colette is not Renée.

A Little-Known Colette Novel and a Famous Ode of Horace

I like to read eclectically.  This weekend I read Colette’s short novel, The Other One, and Horace’s Ode I.Xl,  which urges us to live in the present and carpe diem (seize the day).  

I know perfectly well that you will all prefer reading about Colette, so I’ll start with that.  But I also tacked on my  prose translation of the ode at the bottom of the post.  

The Other One, one of Colette’s lesser-known books, is included in a 1951 omnibus, Short Novels of Colette, which has a 57-page introduction by the novelist Glenway Westcott.  Westcott’s introduction is the liveliest essay I’ve read on Colette,  just as wonderful as Judith Thurman’s biography.

Westcott declares Colette “the greatest living” French writer. (She died in 1954.)  He writes, “I know that in critical prose, as a rule, the effect of the superlative, greatest, is just emotional…. Greater than Mauriac?  Greater than Martin du Gard, Jules Romain, Montherlant, Sartre?  Yes, of course.  But I have not had the zeal to read or re-read that entire bookshelf for the present purpose; nor do I imagine that the reader wants any such thorough and fanatic work.  Let me not pretend to be able to prove anything.  Let me peaceably point to… Colette’s merits, here and there in her work.”

The heroine of The Other One is the intelligent, sensual, lazy Fanny, who has been married for 12 years to Farou, a well-known playwright.  The novel appropriately unfolds rather like a play, characterized by pitch-perfect dialogue, vivid women’s chit-chat, and reactions to a letter.  The letter triggers the subsequent events.

During the unbearable heat of a  summer in the country, Fanny spends her days reading novels, napping, and eating gooseberries.  She is teased about her overeating by her friend Jane, who helps manage the household and is Farou’s secretary.  Meanwhile, Fanny’s stepson, Jean, has spent the summer quietly stalking Jane, on whom he has a crush.

The women are waiting for a letter from Farou, who is in Paris working with the director.   Fanny reads the letter aloud and is amused by his references to an actress:  she gathers he is having an affair, one of many.  A sophisticated woman still loved by her husband, she  dismisses the dalliance as insignificant, but Jane is tense and brittle: her reaction seems over-the-top. Later, Jean confirms Fanny’s  fear that Jane and Farou have had an affair.  It is a nightmare for Fanny.

The most important aspect of a Colette novel is never the plot:  it is the lyrical style, the details of women’s lives, the little things one never knows one has noticed. It resonates when Fanny feels stung seeing Jane lounge in a chair reading a novel.  (“It’s my novel,” and she proceeds to list the other things Jane has stolen:  her husband, her stepson. etc.) In The Other One, there are also pages and pages of good-humored dialogue, delineating the women’s friendship.

This may seem a trivial situation, and Colette has written better about this elsewhere, but the emotional pain is universal. Nothing Colette writes is ever cliched. And the 1931 translation is by Viola Gerard Garvom is smooth, if not great English.

Horace, Ode I.11.  The first time I encountered the phrase carpe diem (seize the day) was in this ode by Horace.   Horace, or the persona of the poem, urges Leuconoë to stop worrying about about the future and seize the day.  I’d  remembered this poem as upbeat, and was disconcerted by the gloom.  Horace wrote several more cheerful poems about seizing the moment, but this is the first in which he uses the phrase Carpe diem.  

And here is my literal prose translation.

Do not seek–it is impious to know–what end the gods have given me, what end to you, Leuconoe.  Don’t try Babylonian astrology, either.  How much better to bear whatever will be!  Whether Jupiter allots more winters, or whether this is the last, which now weakens the Tyrrhene sea crashing against opposite cliffs, be wise, strain clear the wine, and cut back the hope of a long life in a short time span.  While we speak, envious time has fled.  Seize the day, trusting in the future as little as possible.